Secure elements are small devices comprising a memory, a microprocessor and an operating system for computing treatments. Such secure elements may comprise a plurality of memories of different types. They are called “secure” because they are able to control the access to the data they contain and to authorize or not the use of data by other machines. The secure elements may also provide computation services based on cryptographic components. In general, secure elements have limited computing resources and are intended to be connected to a host machine. Secure elements may be removable or fixed to a host device. Smart cards are portable secure elements.
The secure elements may embed an object-oriented virtual machine in order to be able to run applications written in an object-oriented language. Usually, these object-oriented applications manage applicative data which are stored into the secure element. For instance, many smart cards comprise a virtual machine and applets compliant with Javacard® specifications. The applications which are stored and installed into a secure element are usually referred to through an identifier. Such an identifier may be an Application IDentifier (AID) as defined by ISO7816-5 standard for example. An application is usually managed through a package which is loaded in the secure element. Then an instance of the application is created in the secure element. An AID is used for identifying each application package. An AID is used for identifying each application instance. Until now each AID of application package and each AID of application instance must be unique in a secure element. The uniqueness of each AID allows avoiding ambiguity when referring to an element in a secure element. The virtual machine manages both the administration and the interpretation/execution of the applications. The administration corresponds to the loading, the creation/instantiation, the upgrading and the removing of application.
A new need arise for the management of secure elements intended to contain a plurality of applications. It is now asked to download and to install the same application multiple times on the same element. This raises the question of the uniqueness of identifiers embedded in a single secure element.
There is a need for improving the capability to manage several applications which use the same identifier into a secure element.